— 1 — I have excellent friends who know me very well. How do I know? This week, one of them sent me this video with the subject line: “For your prosthetic limbs beat.” — 2 — Presumably he sent it because I’m the kind of person who kept a NYT article on reawakening nerves to give better control over prostheses in my Quick Takes file for six months looking for a chance to slot it in. The complexity of the... Read more
This past weekend, one of my coworkers brought his parents by a work event and I got to do the very fun thing that I get to do very rarely: giving honest, effusive comments. It feels weird (at least for me) to just turn to a friend and say “Do you know why you are extremely delightful? Well…” but much more natural to meet someone’s parents and say: “Do you know the game Set? And there’s usually a point in... Read more
— 1 — Yesterday, I was blogging about abstinence education, shame, and horrible Homeric epithets. That may leave you wondering what kind of sex-ed my high school had. It turns out that my school had an abstinence-only policy, but, instead of damaging content, they went with no content. My semester of sex-ed consisted entirely of the teacher putting on episodes of Freaks and Geeks til the bell rang. — 2 — I reached to Much Ado about Nothing and A Song of Ice and Fire for my... Read more
Calah Alexander kicked off a Patheos Catholic-wide conversation about certain kinds of abstinence-only education with “Sloppy Seconds Sex-Ed” and Elizabeth Scalia has been aggregating the responses. Calah is criticizing specifically the kind of program that sends students (especially women) the message that sex before marriage will leave them used up and worthless. When I heard it, it was glasses of water. Women (and only women, mind you; the boys got a separate talk about cherishing each woman as if she... Read more
— 1 — If I kept a gratitude journal, I’d start every day’s entry with “I am grateful I’m not in law school.” (I hear all the cool parts from my law schools friends or Law and the Multiverse, anyway). But, after seeing beckwithmw’s visualization of thesis length by subject, I’m prepared to add my non-attendance at a lot more grad schools to a daily litany of thanks. — 2 — The tails and travails of my friends were enough... Read more
In C.S. Lewis’s Of Other Worlds, most of the selections in the book are critical essays, but there a few pieces of fiction included, one of which is a never completed novel that C.S. Lewis meant to write about Menelaus and Helen during and after the Trojan War. In the excerpt below, Menelaus stops fantasizing about torturing Helen if he regains her. [H]e wouldn’t torture her. He saw that was nonsense. Torture was all very well for getting information; it was... Read more
Brandon Vogt, author of The Church and New Media has opened a new site called Strange Notions, that’s meant to be a forum for debate and discussion between Catholics and atheists. For some reason, it seemed like the readers of this blog might be interested. Here’s how Brandon describes the site (and explains the name): StrangeNotions.com is designed to be the central place of dialogue between Catholics and atheists. The implicit goal is to bring non-Catholics to faith, especially followers of... Read more
In the collection of C.S. Lewis essays I finished recently(Of Other Worlds), one of the selections (“Unreal Estates”) is the transcript of a discussion between Lewis, Kingsley Amis, and Brian Aldiss on genre literature, among other topics. At one point in the conversation, the following exchange appears: Lewis: By the way, has any science fiction writer succeeded in inventing a third sex? Apart from the third sex we all know. Amis: Clifford Simak invented a set-up where there were seven... Read more
— 1 — The theme for the week is technology solving problems you didn’t know you had. For example, did you realize you needed a site that could rerhythmatize songs to a swing beat? Now your friends can listen to songs they already like while you teach them the basic and underarm turns. — 2 — And this interactive illustration of different search algorithms is also a nice way to give novices a user-friendly intro to a delightful subject. — 3 —... Read more
I tend to rag on postmodernism leading to relativism, so, to see a much more charitable description, you should pop over to Christian H’s blog to read his apologia. [O]ne of the recurrent complaints my peers and I had about some of our English Masters classes was that, at the end of it all, we were afraid of making any positive statements. All we were doing was problematizing. But when all positive statements seem to do damage (to women, to Asian Canadian... Read more
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Unequally Yoked
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